Pregnancy centers aim to serve as alternative to abortion

Monday

Jul 15, 2013 at 12:01 AMJul 15, 2013 at 11:53 AM

The newest location for Pregnancy Decision Health Centers, set to open in Pickerington next month, already has a full slate of volunteers and staff members. They're eager to help make sure that all expectant clients - most of them unmarried and many of them poor - deliver babies.

Rita Price, The Columbus Dispatch

The newest location for Pregnancy Decision Health Centers, set to open in Pickerington next month, already has a full slate of volunteers and staff members. They’re eager to help make sure that all expectant clients — most of them unmarried and many of them poor — deliver babies.

President and CEO Tim Welsh said the faith-based nonprofit group is on track to see about 4,000 women at six central Ohio locations this year. About half of the women who receive a free test turn out to be pregnant, and hundreds are “at risk of abortion” or “abortion-minded,” he said.

Welsh judges the success of his growing organization by the number of women who say they will continue their pregnancies. “It looks like we’re going to get around 600 lives saved this year,” he said.

Ohio wants to help such anti-abortion pregnancy centers do even more. A provision in the state budget establishes the Ohio Parenting and Pregnancy Program and allows an unspecified amount of welfare money to go to nonprofit organizations that promote childbirth, parenting and alternatives to abortion.

Ohio has 12 licensed abortion clinics.

Benjamin Johnson, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said officials don’t yet know how the Ohio Parenting and Pregnancy Program will work.

Critics and abortion-rights supporters say taxpayers shouldn’t pick up the tab for a program that, by design, won’t dispense comprehensive information. For example, most of the more than 100 anti-abortion pregnancy centers in Ohio, including Pregnancy Decision Health Centers, do not provide information about contraception.

“The best resources the state should be spending money on, in terms of reproductive health, is birth control, abstinence education and prenatal care and support for women and their families,” said Dr. Milroy Samuel, a Columbus obstetrician and gynecologist at Complete Healthcare for Women.

Many anti-abortion pregnancy centers, he said, “are biased and politically motivated in swaying a woman to choose an option that best serves the center’s political objectives.”

Complete Healthcare has three offices that offer a range of medical services; adoption referral; and, at its North Side office on Cleveland Avenue, abortions. A Pregnancy Decision Health Center opened next door to that office in 2007.

The pregnancy center in Pickerington will be about a mile from Samuel’s office there.

“Certainly, Dr. Samuel created some motivation” to open a center in Pickerington, said Welsh, a former executive director of Ohio Right to Life. “But, really, the reason we’re opening in Pickerington is that that area of central Ohio has a very high abortion rate.”

Columbus has long been a base for what supporters describe as “neighborhood pregnancy-help centers.”

The world’s largest network — Heartbeat International — advises and supports nearly 1,800 centers from its headquarters on E. Dublin-Granville Road. Heartbeat’s president, Peggy Hartshorn, said its affiliates see about a million women each year.

The centers are “in cities, they’re in small towns, in rural communities,” she said. “They’re very grass-roots.”

Although Heartbeat affiliates vary in size and services offered — about half now offer free ultrasounds — Hartshorn said the shared goal is “healthy babies and healthy moms.”

States are right to take an interest in centers offering alternatives to abortion, including prenatal information and care, counseling, social-service referrals and other forms of assistance, she said.

“The Supreme Court has also confirmed and reiterated that states can pass laws favoring childbirth,” Hartshorn said. “That is one of the things that the state of Ohio is saying here.”

Kellie Copeland, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, said legislators have approved funding for unregulated centers that mislead women and give inaccurate medical information, all claims that the centers dispute.

“It’s a blank check, and that’s one of a variety of reasons why we opposed it,” Copeland said. “ The implementation of this is something we’re going to be following closely.”